Commercial Fishery Licensing, Reporting, and Estimation of Landings.
To purchase striped bass directly from fishermen, fish dealers are required to obtain special authorization from Marine Fisheries in addition to standard seafood dealer permits. Dealer reporting requirements included weekly reporting to the Marine Fisheries Division or Standard Atlantic Fisheries Information System (SAFIS) program of all striped bass purchases. If sent to Division, all landings information is entered into SAFIS by Division personnel. Following the close of the season, dealers are also required to provide a written transcript consisting of purchase dates, number of fish, pounds of fish, and names and permit numbers of fishermen from whom they purchased. Marine Fisheries personnel review dealer transactions and correct entries before calculating total landings. Fishermen must have a Marine Fisheries commercial fishing permit (of any type) and a special striped bass fishing endorsement to sell their catch. They are required to file monthly trip level reports, which include the name of the dealer(s) that they sell to and information describing their catch composition and catch rates.

Estimates of Total Catch and Harvest Rates.
Estimates of harvest rates (pounds of fish harvested per hour) for the commercial fishery were developed in order to provide an index that may be indicative of fishing success. In 2011, MarineFisheries switched to trip-level reporting. Significant information has been lost due to the generalization of the report to cover all fisheries in Massachusetts. The only information now available is daily total hours fished, pounds of fish sold and consumed, and area fished. This information was used under a generalized linear model (GLM) framework to generate standardized indices (Hilborn and Walters 1992). Each record represented the summarization of a permit’s pounds harvested and hours fished by year, month, and area fished reduced to 4 regions (Cape Cod Canal, Southern Massachusetts, Cape Cod Bay, Northern Massachusetts). Only data from July and August were used to constraint analyses to the most recent duration of the fishing season. The harvest rates for each record was calculated by dividing the total pounds caught by the total number of hours fished. The harvest rate was standardized using the GLM model.

Recreational Fishery Licensing and Reporting Requirements:
A recreational fishing permit is required in Massachusetts state waters. Harvest levels: Harvest and total catch estimates were provided by NOAA Fisheries Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP). In 2011, new estimation methods were applied to data collected since 2004, but only small changes (range: -9.1 to 10.1%) were observed for Massachusetts data.

Trends in Catch Rates.
To examine trends in recreational angler catches, standardized catch rates (total number of fish per trip) for striped bass were calculated for all fish caught using a delta-Gamma model (Lo et al. 1992; Stefánsson 1996) which adjusts trip catches for the effects of year, wave, county, area fished, mode fished, and time spent fishing. A delta-Gamma model was selected as the best approach to estimate year effects after examination of model dispersion (Terceiro 2003) and standardized residual deviance plots (McCullagh and Nelder 1989). Total recreational and commercial fish counts and weights were added together to get a yearly stock estimate. All weights have been converted from pounds to kilograms. To fully understand the source and limitations of the data it is highly recommended to review the Massachusetts Striped Bass Monitoring Report for 2013 , http://www.mass.gov/eea/docs/dfg/dmf/publications/tr-59full.pdf

References:
Hilborn, R. and C. J. Walters. 1992. Quantitative Fisheries Stock Assessment: Choice, Dynamics and Uncertainty. Chapman and Hall, Inc., New York, NY
Lo, N. C., L. D. Jacobson, and J. L. Squire. 1992. Indices of relative abundance from fish spotter data based on the delta-lognormal models. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 49:2525-2526.
McCullagh, P. and J. A. Nelder. 1989. Generalized Linear Models. Chapman and Hall, Inc., London.
Stefánsson, G. 1996. Analysis of groundfish survey abundance data: combining the GLM and delta approaches. ICES Journal of Marine Science 53: 577–588.
Terceiro, M. 2003. The statistical properties of recreational catch rate data for some fish stocks off the northeast US coast. Fisheries Bulletin 101: 653-672.

Updated 2014 data using Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries Technical Report TR-62 Massachusetts Striped Bass Monitoring Report for 2014

Gary A. Nelson Massachuestts
Division of Marine Fisheries
Annisquam River Marine Field Station
30 Emerson Avenue
Gloucester, Massachusetts 01930

Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries Technical Report TR-62, Massachusetts Striped Bass Monitoring Report for 2014, G. A. Nelson Commonwealth of Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs Department of Fish and Game Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries 2015 26 pp. http://www.mass.gov/eea/docs/dfg/dmf/publications/tr-62-complete.pdf